Posts by Burnsie 7 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Aug 2011
With their record on Water supply, sewage, Dentists and GP's (plus a lot more) who Trusts the government to be able to deliver enough power for the move to EVs?
We have known for 70 years what power we can supply from Nuclear and roughly what is needed, yet have failed to manage the gap, and it looks like that is happening with green energy sources.
I did work on the autopilot software for a British fighter jet once.
One of the stories we heard was on one of the early versions of the software the 2 digital compass reading were averaged to produce a more accurate heading, unless one was obviously wrong in which case it was dropped.
But the variable held the data as -1 for magnetic south (180 deg), 0 for magnetic north, and 1 bit less that +1 for 179.999 deg.
So if one compass was reading 180 deg, and the other 179.999 deg instead of averaging almost 180 deg it computed a 0.
Good job that one was spotted before the aircraft got airborne.
This was being done on most avionics systems I worked on 40 years ago.
Build in test would check the hardware to make sure the readings were sensible, and software would choose / average readings from the devices before acting on it and displaying it to the pilot / navigator etc.
The event of Fly by Wire meant that even more vigorous checking was done.
/^v.+b$/i
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